‘Pavlov was right:’ training employees to find the docs they need on your intranet

Within every intranet platform, there are important documents every employee needs at one point or another. Whether it’s the holiday calendar, a description of health benefits or a revised organization chart, comms pros hold the keys to directing their colleagues to the right places on the intranet through smart planning and conditioning audience behaviors.

Debra Helwig, internal communications and events director at Pinion, said that by creating easy paths of access for employees, they can help create employee behavior patterns that lead them to the documents they need.

“I subscribe to the philosophy that Pavlov was right — you can train people to go to certain places to look for certain things if you’re consistent in managing how you flow your documents into your site,” she told Ragan.

The Uber comms team organizes its intranet platform by office location and offers one point of access to help create new employee behaviors.

“Everything about that office is in the building user guide and that is on our intranet site, Uber Hub,” said senior manager of global communications Kristin Komar. “We don’t make that information available anywhere else. By making it so that they could only get it in that single spot, it can become a habit.”

Here are some more insights:

• Lean into tech to help guide your colleagues. If people are struggling to find the documents they need, consider using AI to help. Komar said that at Uber, her team created Building User Guides for every employee to have a rundown of all the relevant knowledge of their office and job. But when people were left confused looking for specific attachments, the comms team built searchable terms into the Uber Hub to guide them. These searchable terms were then indexed by AI for easier location. “We gave them all the questions people ask — what’s parking like, what time does lunch start, how can I bring a guest?” Komar said. “It’s made it a lot easier for people who have a question to get straight to the answer without having to know what the document is called.”
• Tangible cues that lead to virtual platforms. Organizing the intranet platform carefully is undoubtedly important — but how can you drive people to the platform in the first place? Komar said that one of the key tools her team uses to drive employees to the intranet is digital signage. “Every single meeting room has TVs on the wall,” she told Ragan. “We promote digital signage on all of those and in hallways throughout every office. For us it was really easy to direct people with a QR code that led to the desired information on Uber Hub. You can’t miss it — it’s in your face literally everywhere.”
• Multiple touch points leading to a single destination. With so many internal comms channels in the mix these days, it can seem like a challenge to get employees to a single host source for important documents. Helwig said that her team tries to solve this problem by linking back to the intranet platform where to documents live on every channel. “For instance, we don’t put the documents in the newsletter,” she said. “We link you back to the intranet. Everything points back to that intranet location as the single source of truth.” She shared Pinion’s open enrollment process as an example of this line of thinking in action. “For open enrollment, we did a post on the intranet, a splash banner and a newsletter,” Helwig said. “All link to the same HR portal page. If enrollment numbers are down, we’ll send targeted emails that also link to that same page.”
• Overcommunication should be the norm. “Don’t be afraid to ask people what they’re looking for,” said Komar. “If you don’t have a baseline for what people are even looking for, it’s hard to know where you’re going to be pointing them.” She added that comms pros should err on the side of giving employees too much information as to where they can find what they’re looking for as opposed to little. “Over-communicate — that’s definitely the thing we like to do,” Komar told Ragan. “If we’re getting the same questions over and over, there are always living FAQ documents that we can point people to. We pin a lot of stuff in Slack as well.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.